Latest Microsoft Blogs

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex   MVC 2 Beta introduces two nice helpers called Html.RenderAction and Html.Action.  Phil Haack described them in detail on his blog , so you may want to read through that before reading this post. Basically, they’re two additional methods that follow the standard MVC pattern of passing the controller name and action name as literal strings, and the action parameters as anonymous objects.  e.g. Copying from Phil’s example, if you have an Action like this: public ActionResult Menu(MenuOptions options) { return PartialView(options); } You can write this in your View: <%= Html.Action("Menu", new { options = new MenuOptions { Width=400, Height=500} })%>...

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release! The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines .  It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines.  This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI .    ASP.NET MVC 2 beta! The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available...

One of the upcoming new features being added to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta is a little helper method called Html.RenderAction and its counterpart, Html.Action . This has been a part of our ASP.NET MVC Futures library for a while, but is now being added to the core product. Both of these methods allow you to call into an action method from a view and output the results of the action in place within the view. The difference between the two is that Html.RenderAction will render the result directly to the Response (which is more efficient if the action returns a large amount of HTML) whereas Html.Action returns a string with the result. For the sake of brevity, I’ll use the term RenderAction to refer to both of these methods. Here’s a quick look at how...

I just returned from Oredev and TechED EMEA , both conferences were very interesting in their own special ways.  TechED was of course bigger with a lot of good sessions on my specific area while Oredev is a bit more small and cozy, and a way to meet people that deal with completely different things than I do, like JRuby, Clojure, UI Design what have you… and I guess to some extent to get a reality check and see what the world looks like outside of my .net bubble:) Windows Crash Dump Analysis with Daniel Pearson In particular I really enjoyed Daniel Pearson’s session on Windows Crash Dump Analysis where he discussed how to debug BSODs (blue-screens). He said something interesting that really struck a chord with me.  “You should be happy...

The ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta was released today! The five big things I’m going to talk about in this post are: The ASP.NET Ajax Library is now in Beta Contributing the ASP.NET Ajax Library to the CodePlex Foundation Merging the Ajax Control Toolkit with the ASP.NET Ajax Library Plans to provide support for the ASP.NET Ajax Library ASP.NET Ajax Library features that provide: Powerful developer libraries and tooling support Performance – build high performance websites Interoperability – use it with any server platform and alongside jQuery Extensible – build on top of the library and inherit from controls like DataView Since July last year the team has been cranking out new features in 6 previews, each with exciting innovations including powerful...

Today at PDC09 (the keynote was streaming live ), Bob Muglia announced the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta . Feel free to download it right away! While you do that I want to present this public service message. The Beta release includes tooling for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. We did not ship updated tooling for Visual Studio 2010 because ASP.NET MVC 2 is now included as a part of VS10, which is on its own schedule. Unfortunately, because Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta share components which are currently not in sync, running ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta on VS10 Beta 2 is not supported . Here are some highlights of what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2. RenderAction (and Action) AsyncController Expression Based Helpers (TextBoxFor, TextAreaFor, etc....

Hi folks! I’m posting this from the PDC09 keynote where I’m listening to Don Box show off Azure ! For web developers, I prepared 30 “Quick Hit” videos on stuff that’s new in the latest wave for ASP.NET Develoeprs. It’s far from a complete list, and they are not meant to be real tutorials (They are NOT How-Do-I videos). Think of them as “feature previews” with more learning based material coming in the near fututr. Here is a partial list. Have fun www.asp.net/learn ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 "Quick Hit" – New Rendering Option for Check Box Lists and Radio Button Lists ASP.NET 4 "Quick Hit" – Persistent GridView Row Selection ASP.NET 4 "Quick Hit" – Table Free Templated Controls ASP.NET 4 "Quick Hit" – Easy State...

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex   T4MVC build 2.5.00 brings a couple of fun new features that I’ll describe in this post.  I can’t take too much credit for them as they came from users who suggested them to me, and helped out getting the code going.   Support for multiple output files Up until now, T4MVC.tt has always generated a single file, which is the T4MVC.cs that you see get nested under it in VS.  And normally, this is the way T4 templates work: they just generate one file.  But last week I got an email from Stuart Leeks who pointed me to a new blog post from Damien Guard that describes a nice way to get around this description.  All of Damien’s logic is very nicely encapsulated...

I’ll be at PDC tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday. If you are attending and want to say hi, you’re most likely to find me in the Web Pavilion (in the big room, next to the Surface lounge). Please also join us for a panel discussion on Wednesday about Open Source on ASP.NET. We’ll have the following people on the panel to answer your questions, and ask you a few too: Scott Hanselman Shaun Walker Sara Ford Glenn Block Clemens Vasters Myself The discussion will be between 2PM and 3PM, in the Web Pavilion. Read More...

Last time I tried to solve one of the deficiencies of data binding by taking advantage of expando attributes. Today I want to throw an idea out there that I’ve been playing with since that blog post.I was looking at WPF’s data binding and wondered what it would take to have data binding in ASP.NET be as first class as data binding in WPF. There is no imperative (unless you mimic the generated code) way to setup 2 way data binding in ASP.NET, but what if there was? Maybe we should be able to setup bindings in the markup as well as code. SetBinding This hypothetical re-design of ASP.NET data binding includes a SetBinding method on the base control class that allows users to specify bindings imperatively. public partial class _Default : System...